One of the major unmet needs in medicine today is a treatment for successfully augmenting collateral function in patients who have severe obstructions in arteries supplying their hearts or their legs. Another unmet need is a treatment for facilitating healing of injured tissue, including burned skin, broken bone, torn tendons, and decubitis ulcers. Each of these processes—the development of collaterals to bypass arterial obstructions and stimulation of new blood vessel development (angiogenesis) to facilitate wound healing—involves complex, multi-molecular processes that cannot simply be replicated by administration of, for example, a single growth factor.
Clearly, additional therapies are needed.